In Bad Behavior, Women Become the New Men

Over the years we have seen Hanoi Jane, Workout Jane and Broadway Jane, the most recent incarnation of the shape-shifting actress who stars in the new drama “33 Variations,” in previews at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. But who is the pert woman in exercise clothes called Jane Fonda currently at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater?

As portrayed by Annie McNamara in “That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play,” a raunchy, savvy and only partly successful black comedy by Sheila Callaghan (“Dead City”), Ms. Fonda wanders in and out of the play, exuding sex appeal, stoically smiling through abuse while serving and cleaning up after the male characters. In the twisted, caffeinated world of the show, which imagines the collective unconscious of a culture where girls never stop going wild, she is the kind of feminist a misogynist dreams about.

“That Pretty Pretty” takes aim at the many debased ways women are represented onstage and on screen. Ms. Callaghan has said she was inspired by a 2005 article in The New York Times about plays in which men behave badly.

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From left, Lisa Joyce, Danielle Slavick and Joseph Gomez in That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, by Sheila Callaghan.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Along with Ms. Fonda, the main characters are Agnes (Lisa Joyce) and Valerie (Danielle Slavick), bloodthirsty ex-strippers on a killing spree who are about as demure, complex and dignified as dancers in a Mötley Crüe video. They love random sex, skimpy clothes and Jell-O wrestling.

Agnes is performed with a ferocious, almost maniacal, flirtatiousness by Ms. Joyce, who, in Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter,” played just the kind of underdeveloped female character that this play mocks. She worships Howard Stern and dreams of breast enlargement, while Valerie likes to be beat up.

If the first half of this wandering play brings to mind a feminist version of George C. Wolfe’s “Colored Museum,” Ms. Callaghan eventually shifts gears to reveal a screenwriter, Owen (a very sly Greg Keller), and his war veteran friend Rodney (Joseph Gomez), who may or may not be the “authors” of the earlier scenes. There is an attempt here at a more realistic style, but Ms. Callaghan and the director, Kip Fagan, maintain the broad strokes of a cartoonist.

The play ends with a screening of Owen’s ridiculous movie and then an easy satire of Hollywood pretensions as he takes questions from fans while hilariously fondling a bottle of water. After claiming that his influences include Godard, Scorsese and Mel Gibson, he says that he’s blind to gender.

Putting aside that this is a regular joke on “The Colbert Report,” it makes him sound like a buffoon, as real as the visions in his head, turning what could have been a provocation into a silly theater of the absurd.